In the early 1980s, Cuiyun Street in Yubei District, Chongqing, also called Cuiyun Commune, appeared in the first batch of private restaurants after the reform and opening up. It is close to the 319 National Highway, and the truck drivers who travel to and from the main city of Chongqing from the northeast area of Chongqing every day are the big customers of the restaurant.
One of them, a small restaurant called Tian's Restaurant, is particularly good. What diners did not expect was that the chef was a 16-year-old teenager. For him, the most memorable memory of childhood is the desire for "meat". All year round, the days when you can eat meat can be counted with your fingers. This is perhaps the biggest source of motivation for Tian Qishu to become a cook.
Tian Qishu is not very good at reading, barely finished junior high school and then suspended school, but in terms of cooking, he is gifted, self-taught, boiled meat slices, boiled loach slices and other spicy boiled series, there are many loyal fans. But with more and more imitators, the teenager's business is gradually not as good as before, which makes him very distressed, and every day he thinks about how to innovate dishes and attract more diners. Unexpectedly, God quickly gave him an answer.
In 1985, the first pot of boiled fish was born by such a chance. However, if you want to open a sect, you can't do it without strong kung fu. From making the first pot of boiled fish to making it really shaped, It took a long time for Tian Qishu.
The condiments and methods of boiled fish look simple and primitive, but like the martial arts of Dao Zhijian, they are often the most unfathomable.
According to the Sichuan Cuisine Recipes, boiled fish is characterized by "oil but not greasy, spicy but not dry, numb but not bitter, and smooth and tender meat". Tian Qishu's self-created boiled fish, because it is located in Cuiyun Township, Yubei, was named "Cuiyun Boiled Fish", which soon became famous.
This is a video of a jade cloud boiled fish taken by an unknown guest in the 1990s. Tian Qishu in the picture is only about 20 years old, but he is already quite business-minded. At that time, because the airport highway was opened to traffic, Cuiyun became a hanging corner, and Tian Qishu immediately moved to a new traffic artery - Yubei Shuangfeng Bridge.
Yubei Shuangfeng Bridge became a veritable "boiled fish street" at that time, although there were many imitators, "Cuiyun boiled fish" has always been the most popular one in the whole street.
In 1999, a mysterious foreigner came to Chongqing by "flying" and walked around shuangfeng bridge in northern Yubei every day. The mysterious diner ate the boiled fish of ShuangfengQiao one by one, and finally locked the boiled fish of Tian Qishu's house for another week. This caught the attention of Tian Qishu.
It turned out that this diner was a chef at a Beijing hotel, who went to the sea to start a business and came to beijing to bring Cuiyun boiled fish to Beijing. But looking at his elderly parents and wife and children, Tian Qishu hesitated, and finally agreed to send a few proud disciples to help.
Since then, boiled fish from Cuiyun in Yubei, Chongqing, has begun to spread to the whole country, and soon became the first Sichuan dish to spread throughout the country. In Beijing alone, 12 stores have been opened successively, with an annual income of more than 600 million yuan. As the founder and technical provider of the dish of boiled fish, Tian Qishu only collects a franchise fee of 200,000 yuan, which is less than the operating income of a store in Beijing for one day.
Tian Qishu's son, Tian Hao, is a post-90s man who returned from studying in the United States 7 years ago and is now in charge of the management of Cuiyun boiled fish. For the long-established brand founded by his father, he has a different business idea.
Young people who have returned from the other side of the ocean, although they are full of modern business philosophy, they are full of respect for their father, who only has a Chinese.
Tian Hao still remembers that when he was 6 years old, the family's business was in full swing, but his father suddenly made a decision that puzzled everyone: temporarily put aside the business in the store and go to chengdu cooking school to learn the authentic cooking skills of Sichuan cuisine. During the graduation examination, Tian Qishu combined what he learned to innovate and produce a new school of boiled meat slices, which were later included in the "Sichuan Cuisine Recipes", and together with the traditional method of boiled meat slices, became a classic method in Sichuan cuisine textbooks.
Later, Tian Qishu also studied under the national special chef Wang Qi, and constantly improved his cooking skills. Now, Tian Qishu still maintains the habit of going out to study every year, and Cuiyun boiled fish can continue to innovate, and has always stood at the head of the wave in the ups and downs of more than 30 years of history.
Source: 1st Eye - Chongqing Radio and Television
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